Social media is an essential component of the marketing strategy of your business. But the way you design your social media strategy might vary depending on the type of business you have, e.g. business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B).
Social media and B2B marketing are a better pair than many business people think. However, some B2B companies still utilize standard methods like paid advertising and cold calling. Social media deserves more investment. Here are some steps to create an effective B2B social media strategy for your business.
Set Your Goals
The first step is to decide what you want to obtain from your social media strategy. Your goals may include brand awareness or higher web traffic. After setting your goals, you can choose which metrics to consider to track your progress. For example, if you want to get leads, you can look at metrics like clicks and conversions. It would be best if you also chose analytical tools to measure your performance.
If you are occasionally posting on various platforms without having goals and benchmarks, you also cannot see whether you are spending your effort and money on the right thing. Having your goals set gives you the roadmap to observe how your B2B company is performing. You can make use of at least one of the best social media tools to plan how you design and conduct your social media strategies.
Create Engaging Content
Your social media content is one of the most visible aspects of your brand identity. Catching attention through content is mostly attributed to B2C companies. However, good quality, engaging content is required to generate leads for a B2B company as well.
The content you create should be appealing for different segments of visitors (such as business owners, industry influencers), and various stages of their engagement with your business. You should make sure that your content reaches all your customers who have different experiences.
Your content should not be solely about promoting your products. Whatever industry is you are working in, catching your audience’s interest and gaining their trust comes first. You can share informative content on social media platforms.
Multimedia is another important point to make a difference with your content. You should not heavily rely on text. Using media types such as videos, images, memes, and charts can help you provide some visual inspiration for your visitors.
Focus on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great platform on which you can engage with your audience. Having over half of the social media traffic for B2B, LinkedIn is the top platform that B2B marketers use to share content. LinkedIn marketing has great potential that should be used.
Firstly, your LinkedIn page is a great place to tell your company’s story. It is essential to show satisfying information about your products and services so that your visitors can get to know you better. You can organize your profile considering your banner image, products and services, status updates, and career opportunities. Your content team can create a catchy description of your business.
It is better to put a humane touch to your LinkedIn marketing strategy by highlighting your team and partners. This move will give a face to your company in the eyes of your visitors. You could post information about your team like short biographies, behind the scenes photos from company gatherings and interviews with team leaders.
Moreover, LinkedIn Ads enables many advertising formats that drive lead generation effectively. The most used ad formats include Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and Text Ads, and LinkedIn Video Ads. Here is how LinkedIn is fueling virtual engagement with LinkedIn Live and Polls options. They seem pretty powerful in making your voice heard and creating a community.
How you engage with your sector is another significant point for your LinkedIn visibility. You should follow the relevant companies in your industry, respond to industry news and trending topics. You can get help from LinkedIn marketing agencies to turn your LinkedIn page to a platform where you create a successful image for your business.
Utilize Additional Social Media Platforms
Acknowledging the importance of LinkedIn for your B2B business, you can rely on other social media platforms as well. This is especially important for branding since it usually comes before the leads for a social media user.
You can observe which platform your competitors and your target audience are using. It is better to have an industry network on a social media platform like Instagram and Twitter. Remember that a useful way to engage with your audience is to create a conversational tone, making comments including some humor.
Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is an effective B2B strategy that will drive leads fast. Influencers can contribute to the brand awareness of your product, or increase web traffic to conversion landing pages. Building connections with influencers is always a good idea to gain more credibility in your B2B sector.
Thanks to influencers, you can reach your target audience of other entrepreneurs, business owners, or high-level decision-makers. You do not need to chase very well-known names; partnering with micro-influencers will work better at the beginning since their audiences are mostly more engaged.
Track Your Competitors
Monitoring your competitors’ activity across social platforms can give you a sense of useful tactics. You should see which platforms your competitors use, how many followers they have, how frequently they are posting, how they are engaging with their customers, or which kind of complaints their customers have about their product.
Along with checking their social media presence, you should use social media monitoring tools to come up with a meaningful competitive analysis report. Thus, you can discover which strategies work for them by seeing the posts that get high engagement, ideal post length, and sharing time. The results of monitoring your competitors will help you determine your tactics.
Analyze Your Work
Now that you have a social media marketing strategy for your B2B business, you should see how much it works. Monitoring your statistics, such as follower growth and engagement rate, is the last essential part. It would help if you utilized the software for managing and measuring social media marketing to reveal which social media channels your visitors came from, what they did once they landed on your webpage. Or if you are organizing a limited campaign, you can analyze the campaign performance by looking at the cost per action.
Along with key metrics, you should also analyze your content. You can use your analytics data to determine which types of posts perform best. Start by analyzing the engagement rate of your posts across platforms to find the most successful ones. You can notice some patterns and common themes among them. Partnering with a social media marketing agency can work.
Even though they are less in number than B2C companies, B2B companies are increasingly relying on social media strategies to attain a well-ranked place in the market. So it is vital to catch this trend. Do not think that your industry is too boring to get some attention on social media. It is time to put some effort to gain branding and drive leads for your B2B business.